From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #24 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Tuesday, February 1 2000 Volume 02 : Number 024 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: stillpt-digest V2 #23 ["Jennifer Stevenson" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 09:05:10 -0600 From: "Jennifer Stevenson" Subject: Re: stillpt-digest V2 #23 Don, w/regard to this post: > "Briefly put, [Jung's] view holds that in the process of ego > development a part of the personality, called the shadow, is > repressed for the sake of the ego ideal. The shadow is the negative > part of the psyche, consisting of all those qualities, values, and > attitudes which the persona finds most despicable, unbearable, and > hateful. These elements generate a powerful, though largely > unconscious, guilt feeling in the individual.... Freedom from the > distress of this feeling, from ths unconscious conflict, is achieved > by the activity known as projection, whereby the negative qualities > resident in the psyche are projected or transferred to the external > world and experienced not as something within but as something > outside and alien to one. So seen, this entity, individual, type, or > group is blamed, attacked, punished, and otherwise eliminated, for > it is literally the stranger, the enemy, the personification of > evil. By instituting such a scapegoat and performing the ritual > expulsion, the individual and the group discharge their own > repressed negative drives and behavior impulses. in this way, the > mind eliminates, at least for a time, those feelings of guilt, > inadequacy, and insecurity that inevitably haunt the psyche which > refuses to face its shadow. Such a psychological interpretation > ...explains the perdurability of the scapegoat...." > > Which sounds to me like the process that Joss Whedon used to write > =Buffy=: all of her negative qualities were embodied in external > characters (Cordelia, Faith, Angel...) and one by one they've been > put behind her and she's moved on. (And the really evil characters-- > vampires, etc.--are the group/community scapegoats.) I've got a screed of my own about horror fiction, taking the position that it is essentially escape fiction, =because= the author's position is that the Horrible Thing is not a part of the self, nor a part of the familiar world (which is an extension of the self)--it's a stranger. OTOH horror can also be a praiseworthy attempt to grapple with something inside that's too painful to live with: it grapples with it by externalizing it, putting an alien monster face on it, and declaring it to be Other, thus giving the participant (reader and author) some elbow room in which to work with their feelings of horror, their anger about the bad things being done, their assessment of the damage and fallout...the psychological "work" that needs to be done when shit happens to people. What drives me nuts about the enthusiasts of horror is that they very carefully never look behind that curtain. They're always cooing about how icky the ideas, the images, the feelings evoked--and never asking, "So what part of all these lies is the Important Lie, the mask over the real crime and real criminal?" Freud betrayed his own theories constantly, a lot like these horror enthusiasts, by claiming to be unafraid to dip his bucket into the darkness and stick his head in it, then at the last minute looking away from anything that might come too close to the bone for himself. He still contributed a lot in terms of encouraging thinkers to look deeper into emotions, especially negative emotions, for the hidden points of attraction and multiple self-contradictions that make people people. Jung was a cool guy. The literary critics have sinned greatly with him, but they do need tenure, after all. Buffy (back on topic) manages not to sin against my amour propre where horror is concerned by =always= keeping the awfulness of real life foreground, and the monsters and monstrous relations with the monsters background, where they act like shadow puppets showing you the DUH! moments in very high contrast--yet ultimately taking a back seat to real life horrors. ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #24 ****************************